Let's get even more personalized

Choose topics that interest you.

So, what do you do?

When you’re talking about the future it’s hard not to get carried away. The The future of almost everything seems exciting. Futuristic cars, houses, and of course, websites, will seemingly be able to perform almost any function, thanks to creativity and advances in technology. So So our imagination runs wild. And we sound like Dave Gelernter sounded in a 1997 BusinessWeek article, when he discussed the radical notion of ”lifestreams” — a flood of data from an individual person that shared every detail of their life. At the time the idea didn’t feel right. – The Future of Websites. MORE

Tweet This Post. Image via Wikipedia. Has your boss started asking you the so-called “tough questions” about social media yet? You know the ones. Is Is anyone making any money on this? Are Are we going to make any money? What’s What’s the ROI for this social stuff? When When are we going to see some results? And And my personal favorite: What’s in it for me ? Now, don’t get me wrong. MORE

Your Facebook fan base is an incredibly powerful marketing asset. You should be aiming to grow the number of fans of your business page in order to continually expand your reach. At the very least, you should be looking to retain the fans you already have. But they already “Liked” your page, so you shouldn’t have to do much to keep them, right? Keep your posts interesting. MORE

You may not recognize the laughing mascot of Bear Manufacturing, but your parents probably would. He’s become a little obscure in recent years, but he had quite a history. The character was developed by the company sometime in the ‘20s and, over the decades, gradually became something of a folk art phenomenon. People like Arizona ex-con-turned-mechanic Moe Allen, who purchased equipment from Bear, began to paint the iconic image on the doors or sides of their body shops as a way to let customers know they carried Bear products. Source: Team Bear USA. MORE

by Maria Pergolino B2B Marketing: The Evolution of a Marketer. According to Merriam Webster, by definition, evolution is “a process of continuous change from a lower, simpler, or worse to a higher, more complex, or better state.” Sales Centric: The initial breakthrough on the path to modern marketing was Gutenberg’s printing press. Marketing, in the beginning, was focused predominantly on sales. MORE

The following post is an adapted excerpt from our new ebook, How to Increase Awareness and Generate Leads With Local SEO. For more tips on how to leverage local SEO, download the free ebook here. Leveraging local SEO can be a great way to get your business found by local searchers. Standard SEO practices apply here. First, try to include your city or regional keywords in: Your URL. Page Titles. MORE

I recently heard from one of my regular readers who challenged a premise I made in my most recent post, For Sales: Practice makes perfect. I was thrilled to hear from Bob Terson , who is an accomplished sales guy and author, for two reasons. First, I was happy to know that I actually had a regular reader, and second I love being challenged. said “there is no such thing as a born salesperson” in my blog, but that’s not entirely true. Bob’s brother returned to music once he had reached his financial goals through sales. learned this lesson from another Bob. Life was good. MORE

Since I moved into our agency’s interactive department almost a year ago, I’ve noticed something surprising. B2B companies are very unconformable with creativity…especially when it comes to their website. Ironically, creativity is the #1 quality marketers seek from an agency when they hire them, but they rarely approve the creative ideas. guess the client/agency [.]. content Creative Interactive MORE

Speak to engineers across the board about what keeps them awake at night and you are likely to hear these three words repeatedly: Risk. Security. Compliance. Does your website content address those issues? The content on your industrial site may be missing the mark completely if it doesn’t speak directly to engineers’ pain points. If you are in the process of redesigning your industrial website, pause for a moment and think about the site content first. think Jeffrey Zeldman ( @zeldman ), the renowned web designer and blogger, summed up the problem best when he said, “Content precedes design. MORE

When communicating with your target audience, it’s important to understand where most people will see and hear your messages as well as where they want to see and hear them. As part of your targeting tactics, you should look beyond where your audience can hear from you and think more about how they prefer to interact with you. Share Your Content. Figure Out What Content Is Most Engaging. MORE

B2B Demand Generation | Leaving Effective Voice-mail Messages. Good B2B demand generation relies on the phone. Emails are not two-way, so the phone. Kelley Robertson. plays a critical role in uncovering buyer needs and preferences. This means they leave lots and lots of voice mail messages. Improving the effectiveness of those messages would help a lot. So we want to share this post by a good friend that ran at RainToday. The permalink to the original post is here. All effective voice mail messages have one thing in common: they focus on a potential problem that the prospect might have. MORE

The Mi6 Chart of the Day is a new blog series where we feature a chart each weekday that we think is relevant and of interest to our readers. Our readers are comprised of entrepreneurs, business owners, marketing, sales and business development professionals. tweet charts regularly via my Twitter stream which are archived on my Posterous site here. Some Thoughts to Consider. MORE

Do the top 20% really bring in 80% of the bacon? The most recent issue of Chief Executive magazine features an insightful piece on “Raising Sales Force Effectiveness,” by the CEO of the Chally Group , and Ohio-based firm that focuses on sales force potential and performance measurement. Lesson: Build your sales force with people who are focused on customer service, not simply on making the sale. MORE

B2B Lead Generation | Lessons from a MarketingSherpa case study. We wish to share our thoughts on this MarketingSherpa case study, because we believe they missed one very important take-away. Centerbeam, a company that delivers technology infrastructure support for mid-sizedbusinesses, was the subject of a case study by MarketingSherpa recently. You can read the case study at Lead Generation: How ignoring 16,896 companies helped improve Sales-Marketing alignment. We wish to share our thoughts on this case study with our fans. Please note that Pointclear helped this company with this project. MORE

How many zombies are among your Facebook fans or Twitter followers? New research conducted by DDB indicates that fans and followers “unlike” brands who are too blabby or too irrelevant. Yet the numbers of disaffected fans who take the time to unlike your brands are in the minority. For every “unliker,” there are five former fans who have bailed out but not bothered to click the unlike button. If social media users act like e-mail users (and there’s a 90+ percent overlap) you can assume that 12-15 percent of your base is the unidentified dead. It’s a conversation. MORE

According to Gordon Beattie of Beattie Communications, social media is a waste of time and money for many companies.For those on a limited budget, and who doesn’t claim that to be a reality, Beattie suggests they are better off: getting their websites to the top of the search engines or grabbing the headlines in the press and media is going to give them a much better return than a social media marketing campaign. The truth is that the majority of companies are wasting valuable manpower and financial resources on social media. There’s a lot to unpack in here. MORE

The Windows Azure team needed to prove that its cloud platform made fiscal sense, comparing the TCO savings of its cloud platform to existing on-premise options. Using the tool, customers can assess unique opportunities and savings, obtaining a 20+ page business case analysis. The tool has been used on average in hundreds of key selling situations to help promote Azure migrations. MORE

Is trusted advisor the theme of the week? have at least half a dozen emails, voice mails and other rubbish asking to be my trusted advisor on everything from social media to something called talent optimization ( which is either bagpipe lessons or a hit squad for employees I don’t like). Forgive the unfortunate visual but asking to be my trusted advisor is a bit like asking to be my strapless bra. May I suggest that if you do either of these things, you need to reevaluate some life decisions. …We believe in being more than just a loan officer, we are your trusted advisor.We MORE

The Unified Communications market is extremely competitive, and in order to move the discussion forward with today's more skeptical / frugal buyer, ShoreTel needed to quantify and prove the head-to-head cost advantages and superior value compared to competitive offerings. TCO Calculator TCO Tools ShoreTel Total Cost of Ownership TCO Pisello Alinean MORE

If you're selling technology, you know how hard it can be to get your customers to understand the performance-enhancing business value that your company actually provides. That's why I think you'll like Cloudy, With a Chance of Rainmaking , a new ebook by Eric Beckman , EVP at Executive Conversation, Inc. See Growth As Your Window of Opportunity. 3. MORE

Everyone needs a reason to do things. As marketers we are always asking prospects to give us their time, attention, or business. As freelance professionals we do the same things in our own professional lives. This week the Savvy Sisters share the reasons they give that get prospects off the fence. Jamie. Show, don't tell. It's always about the prospect's problem. What is your value add? MORE

The federal government is looking for new sources of "revenue" these days. Let's hope they don't target the over $100 billion spent on employee incentive programs, much of which is probably not taxed. That's because most MORE

by Joe Chernov | Tweet this A couple weeks ago, I attended Content Marketing World , where I presented on the business value of infographics. Although the conference was chock full o’ content marketing goodness, one line rang most loudly: “You’ve gotta go through the eyes to get to the brain.”. Michael Stelzner of Social Media Examiner delivered that gem as he riffed on the importance of design. MORE

Have you heard about Universal Search? It’s Google’s term to describe their search results. Nowadays Google ranks more than just websites. Powerpoint presentations, Adobe pdf’s, photographs, news stories, blogs, videos, and other online content are now shown in search results – making it Universal. If your business puts video online, make sure it’s optimized for search engines. What have you done? MORE

Question: How do we become cool and trendy inbound marketers? Answer: Try QR codes. Response: Hooray! We’ll put a QR code on our website today. Weeks later.). Question: What were your results? Answer: Uh…? There are a few problems with this interaction, and many modern marketers are facing them today. Your mobile browser will then direct you to the linked site. Using QR Codes Online. MORE

This is an excerpt from our new ebook, 100 Inbound Marketing Content Ideas. For more ideas like these for Twitter and blogging, download the ebook here. Facebook offers a great opportunity to engage your prospects with its business pages. From videos to photos to questions, there are many different features within Facebook pages that allow you to appeal to every type of user. … ”). 8. MORE

If you thought Facebook was going to sit back and just watch Google+ take over, you were greatly mistaken. Yesterday, Facebook announced two brand new updates, which enhance the News Feed by consolidating 'top stories' and 'most recent' stories into one single feed and introduces a completely new feature called Ticker. Facebook's New Features. The new Ticker solves this. Marketing Takeaway. MORE

The best B2B marketing blogs are once again creatively presented by marketing automation provider Eloqua and JESS3 in this year’s Blog Tree. It’s gratifying to see that Webbiquity sprouted a leaf this time out. As Joe Chernov explains in his blog tree post , “All gene pools benefit from healthy DNA, and if the blogosphere is going to continue to evolve, it’s important that new voices are heard. MORE

The world of B2B marketing continues to change at an incredibly rapid pace. Just when it seems that marketing automation and social media are finally being adopted, we have pundits proclaiming them passé and that more cosmic shifts are underway. Yet in the midst of all this transformation in the B2B marketing landscape, reports have shown that many are still missing the mark and drawing the ire of CEOs. Press & Social News MORE

by Joe Chernov | Tweet this A couple weeks ago, I attended Content Marketing World , where I presented on the business value of infographics. Although the conference was chock full o’ content marketing goodness, one line rang most loudly: “You’ve gotta go through the eyes to get to the brain.”. Michael Stelzner of Social Media Examiner delivered that gem as he riffed on the importance of design.

Have you heard about Universal Search? It’s Google’s term to describe their search results. Nowadays Google ranks more than just websites. Powerpoint presentations, Adobe pdf’s, photographs, news stories, blogs, videos, and other online content are now shown in search results – making it Universal. If your business puts video online, make sure it’s optimized for search engines. What have you done?

The best B2B marketing blogs are once again creatively presented by marketing automation provider Eloqua and JESS3 in this year’s Blog Tree. It’s gratifying to see that Webbiquity sprouted a leaf this time out. As Joe Chernov explains in his blog tree post , “All gene pools benefit from healthy DNA, and if the blogosphere is going to continue to evolve, it’s important that new voices are heard.

Speak to engineers across the board about what keeps them awake at night and you are likely to hear these three words repeatedly: Risk. Security. Compliance. Does your website content address those issues? The content on your industrial site may be missing the mark completely if it doesn’t speak directly to engineers’ pain points. If you are in the process of redesigning your industrial website, pause for a moment and think about the site content first. think Jeffrey Zeldman ( @zeldman ), the renowned web designer and blogger, summed up the problem best when he said, “Content precedes design.

This is an excerpt from our new ebook, 100 Inbound Marketing Content Ideas. For more ideas like these for Twitter and blogging, download the ebook here. Facebook offers a great opportunity to engage your prospects with its business pages. From videos to photos to questions, there are many different features within Facebook pages that allow you to appeal to every type of user. … ”). 8.

Do the top 20% really bring in 80% of the bacon? The most recent issue of Chief Executive magazine features an insightful piece on “Raising Sales Force Effectiveness,” by the CEO of the Chally Group , and Ohio-based firm that focuses on sales force potential and performance measurement. Lesson: Build your sales force with people who are focused on customer service, not simply on making the sale.

Tweet This Post. Image via Wikipedia. Has your boss started asking you the so-called “tough questions” about social media yet? You know the ones. Is Is anyone making any money on this? Are Are we going to make any money? What’s What’s the ROI for this social stuff? When When are we going to see some results? And And my personal favorite: What’s in it for me ? Now, don’t get me wrong.

When communicating with your target audience, it’s important to understand where most people will see and hear your messages as well as where they want to see and hear them. As part of your targeting tactics, you should look beyond where your audience can hear from you and think more about how they prefer to interact with you. Share Your Content. Figure Out What Content Is Most Engaging.

Is trusted advisor the theme of the week? have at least half a dozen emails, voice mails and other rubbish asking to be my trusted advisor on everything from social media to something called talent optimization ( which is either bagpipe lessons or a hit squad for employees I don’t like). Forgive the unfortunate visual but asking to be my trusted advisor is a bit like asking to be my strapless bra. May I suggest that if you do either of these things, you need to reevaluate some life decisions. …We believe in being more than just a loan officer, we are your trusted advisor.We

B2B Lead Generation | Lessons from a MarketingSherpa case study. We wish to share our thoughts on this MarketingSherpa case study, because we believe they missed one very important take-away. Centerbeam, a company that delivers technology infrastructure support for mid-sizedbusinesses, was the subject of a case study by MarketingSherpa recently. You can read the case study at Lead Generation: How ignoring 16,896 companies helped improve Sales-Marketing alignment. We wish to share our thoughts on this case study with our fans. Please note that Pointclear helped this company with this project.

25 B2B marketing thought leaders answer the question "What do you expect to B2B marketers to be doing more of or differently in 2016?" The results are amazing insights around content marketing, achieving business results, alignment, employee advocacy, new technologies, customer experience and more.

Question: How do we become cool and trendy inbound marketers? Answer: Try QR codes. Response: Hooray! We’ll put a QR code on our website today. Weeks later.). Question: What were your results? Answer: Uh…? There are a few problems with this interaction, and many modern marketers are facing them today. Your mobile browser will then direct you to the linked site. Using QR Codes Online.

Speak to engineers across the board about what keeps them awake at night and you are likely to hear these three words repeatedly: Risk. Security. Compliance. Does your website content address those issues? The content on your industrial site may be missing the mark completely if it doesn’t speak directly to engineers’ pain points. If you are in the process of redesigning your industrial website, pause for a moment and think about the site content first. think Jeffrey Zeldman ( @zeldman ), the renowned web designer and blogger, summed up the problem best when he said, “Content precedes design.

This is an excerpt from our new ebook, 100 Inbound Marketing Content Ideas. For more ideas like these for Twitter and blogging, download the ebook here. Facebook offers a great opportunity to engage your prospects with its business pages. From videos to photos to questions, there are many different features within Facebook pages that allow you to appeal to every type of user. … ”). 8.

Do the top 20% really bring in 80% of the bacon? The most recent issue of Chief Executive magazine features an insightful piece on “Raising Sales Force Effectiveness,” by the CEO of the Chally Group , and Ohio-based firm that focuses on sales force potential and performance measurement. Lesson: Build your sales force with people who are focused on customer service, not simply on making the sale.

Everyone needs a reason to do things. As marketers we are always asking prospects to give us their time, attention, or business. As freelance professionals we do the same things in our own professional lives. This week the Savvy Sisters share the reasons they give that get prospects off the fence. Jamie. Show, don't tell. It's always about the prospect's problem. What is your value add?

The Mi6 Chart of the Day is a new blog series where we feature a chart each weekday that we think is relevant and of interest to our readers. Our readers are comprised of entrepreneurs, business owners, marketing, sales and business development professionals. tweet charts regularly via my Twitter stream which are archived on my Posterous site here. Some Thoughts to Consider.

When you’re talking about the future it’s hard not to get carried away. The The future of almost everything seems exciting. Futuristic cars, houses, and of course, websites, will seemingly be able to perform almost any function, thanks to creativity and advances in technology. So So our imagination runs wild. And we sound like Dave Gelernter sounded in a 1997 BusinessWeek article, when he discussed the radical notion of ”lifestreams” — a flood of data from an individual person that shared every detail of their life. At the time the idea didn’t feel right. – The Future of Websites.

The Windows Azure team needed to prove that its cloud platform made fiscal sense, comparing the TCO savings of its cloud platform to existing on-premise options. Using the tool, customers can assess unique opportunities and savings, obtaining a 20+ page business case analysis. The tool has been used on average in hundreds of key selling situations to help promote Azure migrations.

by Maria Pergolino B2B Marketing: The Evolution of a Marketer. According to Merriam Webster, by definition, evolution is “a process of continuous change from a lower, simpler, or worse to a higher, more complex, or better state.” Sales Centric: The initial breakthrough on the path to modern marketing was Gutenberg’s printing press. Marketing, in the beginning, was focused predominantly on sales.

If you're selling technology, you know how hard it can be to get your customers to understand the performance-enhancing business value that your company actually provides. That's why I think you'll like Cloudy, With a Chance of Rainmaking , a new ebook by Eric Beckman , EVP at Executive Conversation, Inc. See Growth As Your Window of Opportunity. 3.

Your Facebook fan base is an incredibly powerful marketing asset. You should be aiming to grow the number of fans of your business page in order to continually expand your reach. At the very least, you should be looking to retain the fans you already have. But they already “Liked” your page, so you shouldn’t have to do much to keep them, right? Keep your posts interesting.

If you thought Facebook was going to sit back and just watch Google+ take over, you were greatly mistaken. Yesterday, Facebook announced two brand new updates, which enhance the News Feed by consolidating 'top stories' and 'most recent' stories into one single feed and introduces a completely new feature called Ticker. Facebook's New Features. The new Ticker solves this. Marketing Takeaway.

How many zombies are among your Facebook fans or Twitter followers? New research conducted by DDB indicates that fans and followers “unlike” brands who are too blabby or too irrelevant. Yet the numbers of disaffected fans who take the time to unlike your brands are in the minority. For every “unliker,” there are five former fans who have bailed out but not bothered to click the unlike button. If social media users act like e-mail users (and there’s a 90+ percent overlap) you can assume that 12-15 percent of your base is the unidentified dead. It’s a conversation.

According to Gordon Beattie of Beattie Communications, social media is a waste of time and money for many companies.For those on a limited budget, and who doesn’t claim that to be a reality, Beattie suggests they are better off: getting their websites to the top of the search engines or grabbing the headlines in the press and media is going to give them a much better return than a social media marketing campaign. The truth is that the majority of companies are wasting valuable manpower and financial resources on social media. There’s a lot to unpack in here.

The following post is an adapted excerpt from our new ebook, How to Increase Awareness and Generate Leads With Local SEO. For more tips on how to leverage local SEO, download the free ebook here. Leveraging local SEO can be a great way to get your business found by local searchers. Standard SEO practices apply here. First, try to include your city or regional keywords in: Your URL. Page Titles.

The world of B2B marketing continues to change at an incredibly rapid pace. Just when it seems that marketing automation and social media are finally being adopted, we have pundits proclaiming them passé and that more cosmic shifts are underway. Yet in the midst of all this transformation in the B2B marketing landscape, reports have shown that many are still missing the mark and drawing the ire of CEOs. Press & Social News

I recently heard from one of my regular readers who challenged a premise I made in my most recent post, For Sales: Practice makes perfect. I was thrilled to hear from Bob Terson , who is an accomplished sales guy and author, for two reasons. First, I was happy to know that I actually had a regular reader, and second I love being challenged. said “there is no such thing as a born salesperson” in my blog, but that’s not entirely true. Bob’s brother returned to music once he had reached his financial goals through sales. learned this lesson from another Bob. Life was good.

Since I moved into our agency’s interactive department almost a year ago, I’ve noticed something surprising. B2B companies are very unconformable with creativity…especially when it comes to their website. Ironically, creativity is the #1 quality marketers seek from an agency when they hire them, but they rarely approve the creative ideas. guess the client/agency [.]. content Creative Interactive

B2B Demand Generation | Leaving Effective Voice-mail Messages. Good B2B demand generation relies on the phone. Emails are not two-way, so the phone. Kelley Robertson. plays a critical role in uncovering buyer needs and preferences. This means they leave lots and lots of voice mail messages. Improving the effectiveness of those messages would help a lot. So we want to share this post by a good friend that ran at RainToday. The permalink to the original post is here. All effective voice mail messages have one thing in common: they focus on a potential problem that the prospect might have.

The federal government is looking for new sources of "revenue" these days. Let's hope they don't target the over $100 billion spent on employee incentive programs, much of which is probably not taxed. That's because most

You may not recognize the laughing mascot of Bear Manufacturing, but your parents probably would. He’s become a little obscure in recent years, but he had quite a history. The character was developed by the company sometime in the ‘20s and, over the decades, gradually became something of a folk art phenomenon. People like Arizona ex-con-turned-mechanic Moe Allen, who purchased equipment from Bear, began to paint the iconic image on the doors or sides of their body shops as a way to let customers know they carried Bear products. Source: Team Bear USA.